often become lawyers, professors’ children often become professors, musicians’ children often become musicians. But a translator’s children almost never take up their parent’s ridiculous lance. Perhaps they learn at an early age that their parent is tilting at windmills (or are these children, like most adults, simply unable to see the dragons?). Perhaps they resent their parent’s closing himself up in his study all those evenings and weekends producing nothing but books with somebody else’s name on them. Perhaps it’s just that translation is generally a sideline, not a profession, and it’s hardly a pasttime in which the whole family can take part, like skiing, gardening, or playing music together.
Well, I did find one translator who had the experience of growing up in a family that translated together (and, yes, stayed together). I didn’t have to go far to find her either, because she had translated a book for me and she lives and works only twenty minutes away. Her name is Krishna Winston, and her parents were Richard and Clara Winston, a well-regarded, full-time, German-intoEnglish translation team. Winston told me: “My parents worked at home, and they worked together, so they were always talking about their work. They talked about translation problems, they talked about authors, and they talked about books. And when my sister and I got a little older, they would throw out problems for us. ‘How do you say such and such?’ My father would be preoccupied with some translation problem, and the whole family would get drawn into it.
“What I particularly remember was a later time, when I was already a young teenager, when my parents were translating the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer’s novel The Demons, and there was a long section in that book which was written in pseudomedieval German. So my parents were reading up to try to find some equivalent English diction, and for some reason they lit on William Caxton, and they had the whole family talking in Caxton’s English. We all developed roles. We were monks, and I think I was Brother Sebastian and my sister was Brother Ambrose. We used to just go for hours talking in this tongue. And it went on for quite a while, because the chapter was a long one and my father struggled with it. I suppose that with influences like this, one inevitably starts
to think, well, this is something I would enjoy doing, too.”
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